


Running Hot

by Tierfal



Category: Fullmetal Alchemist - All Media Types
Genre: Banter, Canon: Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood, Fluff, Innuendo, M/M, Sickfic, so many shades of denial; so little time
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-20
Updated: 2020-12-20
Packaged: 2021-03-10 23:15:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 11,346
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28185264
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tierfal/pseuds/Tierfal
Summary: Ed turns up to Al's graduation ill enough to require rescue, and Roy… really shouldn't be surprised.
Relationships: Edward Elric/Roy Mustang
Comments: 63
Kudos: 532
Collections: Roy/Ed Week 2020





	Running Hot

**Author's Note:**

> If you shout "PARKOUR" while you're writing the exact same boring-ass fic for the umpteenth time, it doesn't count. Those are the rules that I just made up.
> 
> This extremely predictable little number is for the prompt "fever" for [Roy/Ed week](https://royedpalooza.tumblr.com)! XD There is… innuendo. I can't leave these two alone for five minutes. Post-Brotherhood AU where arm + alchemy stuck around, as we usually do.
> 
> I hope you are in the mood for cotton candy and enjoy the ride ♥

Roy would have liked to take credit for everything going according to plan, but he was well-aware that planning and execution were two entirely separate skills; and also that he would long since have been lost to the ravages of unwritten history if it wasn’t for one Riza Hawkeye.

Still, there was something quietly satisfying about having brought Gracia and Elysia to the archway outside the university that was to be their meeting place, knowing that Riza and the others would be along soon, and catching a glimpse of Ed’s impossibly bright hair coming towards them through the crowd.

Or, at least, there was right up until the hair’s bearer drew close enough for a proper look.

“Ed,” Roy said, “you look _terrible_.”

Despite the fact that that was actually rather charitable—Ed looked like he’d crawled out of the grave this morning and dusted the dirt off of his shoulders; his cheeks were sheet-pale, his nose was a stark red, his eyes were redder, and the circles underneath his eyes could have made purple hammocks for small children—what appeared to be an illness hell-bent on his destruction did not stop him from screwing his beleaguered face up into a scowl.

“Right back at you,” he said, “you absolute ba—” His eyes flicked to Elysia. “…b… boy, it’s… been a while.”

“I mean it,” Roy said, not daring to turn and expose himself to the knowing look that he _knew_ Gracia was giving him right now. “Are you sure—”

“I’m not gonna miss Al’s graduation just ’cause some lousy virus picked a fight with my immune system,” Ed said, folding his arms tightly across his chest. His right wrist gleamed between the hem of his glove and the sleeve of his shirt. “I’ll be fine.”

He already was, of course, when you got right down to it: even slouching a little, looking like he was one misstep away from collapsing on the street, the last six years had isolated every jagged edge of him and honed them all to diamond facets that could have cut a man to ribbons while casting rainbows. The shoulders, the hips, the waist, the ponytail, the angle of his jaw, his cheekbones, his sardonically arching eyebrow—

“Try it,” Ed said. “Tell me what to do, and see what happens. Jeez—” This to Gracia and Elysia, in a completely different tone of voice. “I’d better not hug you. That sucks. Rain check?”

“Roy’s right,” Gracia said, and Roy made a sincere effort to keep the smugness out of his expression. “You look really sick, dear. I know Al wouldn’t mind if—”

“ _I’d_ mind,” Ed said, somehow managing to look more stricken still. “He’s only gonna graduate once, and it took so much to get here, and… The ceremony’s only supposed to be an hour, anyway. I promise I’ll go home and sleep as soon as it’s over, okay?”

Gracia smiled warmly. Roy privately— _very_ privately—called her particular brand of subtle coercion momchinations. Hughes would have been delighted, both with the awful wordplay and with the fact that she was carrying on the tradition of tricking other people into doing what was best for them.

Roy realized only after he’d opened his mouth that he was about to offer to drive Ed back. It was strange for several reasons, foremost among them the fact that the lovely ladies of the Hughes family were his charges and ought to have been his first priority. For another thing, it would mean that he would miss the entire party afterward, which he’d been looking forward to in idle hours for weeks.

Ed was his friend. That much was undeniable after the myriad ways that they’d made peace over the years.

But it wasn’t anything… _else_. It wasn’t anything more than that. Roy liked ribbing him at their shared circle’s social events because he would spit fire right back and give as good as he ever got; and Roy savored listening to him because he was, quite simply, a genius; and Roy was always tickled when he could make Ed laugh because it had been so damn difficult to find common ground in their early acquaintance. It was all reactionary—it was just the counterbalance of everything that they’d been to one another in the years before. It wasn’t anything extraordinary, or special, or meaningful, or… And _yes_ , of course Roy had factually acknowledged that Ed had grown into his father’s jaw with a grace that sometimes left passersby speechless, but it wasn’t… it didn’t…

Roy blinked twice and rediscovered himself in a reality where Gracia was giving Ed advice on home remedies for cooling his fever if painkillers didn’t bring it down. It occurred to Roy that he wanted very badly to stroke Ed’s hair back and lay a wet towel on his forehead. It occurred to him that that was not an especially platonic response to the presented stimuli. It occurred to him that he had _always_ tried to keep the people that he was most interested in at arm’s length by teasing them glibly, so that he couldn’t open up and scare them off even if he wanted to; and it occurred to him that he would be enormously lucky if Riza was the only person who had picked up on it this time.

It occurred to him that he was an idiot.

It occurred to him that he was fucked.

It occurred to him that Elysia was watching him with a larger-than-was-promising dose of her father’s laser-eyed perceptiveness.

For likely the millionth time in his life, however, Riza appeared from the ether in the nick of time and saved Roy from a cataclysm of his own making.

In addition—likely also for the millionth time in his life—she had his entire team trailing behind her with a crisp obedience that he could never so much as fondly dream of, but at least today it made for a viable distraction.

“We should queue up,” Riza said, “since I presume that we’re all going to sit together in order to maximize our collective humiliating volume when they call out Al’s name.”

“I brought an airhorn,” Havoc said, and the look of sheer delight on Ed’s face made Roy so damn sure of all of it that he wanted to walk off of the campus right this second, and continue walking until he hit a mountain range.

“Here,” Breda said, offering out half a dozen of those little paper tubes that made a tragic honking noise when you blew into them.

“Oh, dear,” Gracia said. “Well, now I’m very glad that I brought earplugs.”

Ed grinned, and tilted his head, and the ponytail slithered across his shoulder, and he really was the single most beautiful nightmare that Roy had ever had.

“You ain’t seen nothin’ yet,” Ed said.

  


* * *

  


“I should sit on the end of the aisle,” Ed said as they staked out a row near the front in order to impose their obnoxiousness on as many people as possible. “So that I only infect one person if I’m still contagious. Mustang, sit next to me.”

Roy blinked. He felt entitled. “I beg your—”

“No one’ll care if you have to miss a day of work,” Ed said. “Probably no one will even notice that you’re gone.”

Fuery laughed very, very hard and then clapped a hand over his mouth, looking startled.

Roy hadn’t seen him laugh like that since Aerugo.

If Roy had known that all it would take was skewering his dignity in public, he would have made a hell of a lot more progress over the course of the intervening years. At least he knew now.

“Fascinating,” Roy said. “Alphonse has managed to study hard, make friends, and earn himself a remarkable degree, and all that you’ve accomplished lately is somehow becoming an even more insufferable little brat.”

Ed snickered, and Roy sat.

Roy realized that he didn’t want to trot out the usual _How are things_. No one ever answered that question honestly—how could they? It was just a part of the social niceties script. There was never time to tell a story; it would be rude to complain; no one ever asked it looking for the truth.

Roy wanted the truth. He wanted to know. He wanted to be privy to all of the minor annoyances and tiny triumphs in Edward Elric’s life.

Universities never started these damn things on time anyway.

“So,” Roy said. “What’s the single most criminal thing that they’re teaching students in alchemy classes these days?”

Ed’s red-rimmed eyes lit up.

  


* * *

  


The extensiveness and severity of the alchemical instruction crimes perpetrated by Al’s academic program were, apparently, matched only by Ed’s dogged determination not to point them out because he didn’t want to deter Al from enjoying his education even if it was, in so many words, “such a colossally shitty insult to the entire discipline that the king of Xerxes is probably cringing in whatever hole in the sand his ass ended up in.” Evidently, this particular course emphasized theory over practice every step of the way, and had offered only a handful of opportunities for actually attempting the techniques that its students were paying to learn. Roy supposed that that was, from a purely pragmatic perspective, a wise way to cut down on workplace incidents; but to a pair of alchemists who had learned nearly everything worth knowing from enormous, costly mistakes…

It was a lively conversation, insofar as it brought out the animated gestures and free-flowing expletives that had always characterized Ed’s excitement; and insofar as it overcame the increasingly disconcerting pallor of his bloodless cheeks; and insofar as it made Roy feel so damn young and energized that it was really quite embarrassing. All this time, he’d been rummaging around in his own life for reasons to look forward to the future, for something like inspiration; and all this time—

There was a thin sheen of sweat on Ed’s forehead, and Roy had to resist the powerful urge to put his glasses on so that he could look more closely and see if there were tiny droplets clinging to the edge of the pale scar over Ed’s eyebrow. Ed was sicker than he’d let on, which wasn’t really a surprise, but since Roy knew that he’d have the support of everyone who cared about either of them when he inevitably threw Ed over his shoulder and carried a screeching alchemist like a sack of potatoes to his car, all that was left was to hope that the dull formality part of the afternoon went as quickly as possible.

Despite his fervent hopes, however, it positively _crawled_.

Roy had only attended a scattering of graduations over the years—including his own from the academy, which he remembered only as a blurry, panicked mess of trying to figure out what to say to Hughes, who had just introduced Roy to his lovely new girlfriend two hours before Roy had been planning to ask if he wanted to move in together now—and most of them had been like this. A pair of students with impressive academic records gave unimpressive speeches. An announcer started droning out names, and students quick-stepped across the stage to collect a piece of paper that might not even have anything printed on it, since they’d likely receive their actual diplomas later in the mail.

Ed didn’t seem bothered, which was remarkable in its own right, given his attention span for other people’s business the majority of the time. But then, Ed’s eyes were trained immovably on the bright-gold head in the second row wearing a mortarboard that said _Equivalent exchange (+1)_.

When Al’s row was brought up to stand along the edge of the stage, Ed’s whole body went rigid in anticipation. As the dean or professor or whoever was making the name announcements began moving through the _E_ s, Ed clenched his hands together so tightly that Roy couldn’t imagine that there wouldn’t be bruises forming on the left.

Then the man at the microphone said “Alphonse Elric.”

And all hell broke loose.

Perhaps ‘hell’ was a strong word, but a woman behind them actually screamed when the nine of them erupted to their feet, roaring at the top of their lungs like—appropriately enough—a pride of lions. Havoc hit the air horn before any of them had even paused to draw a breath. Roy might have been the first to stop, but since he did it to wolf-whistle so piercingly that it echoed back off of the rafters, he thought that the others might forgive him.

Alphonse was beaming like the break of dawn, brighter by the second. He was also crying. He stopped halfway across the stage to bow deeply and theatrically, throwing his arms out on either side, and then proceeded the rest of the way to collect his little scroll and enthusiastically shake the very startled-looking announcer’s hand.

Then they all sat down.

Roy crossed his legs primly and resisted the urge to look back and see if the woman that they’d terrified the life out of looked all right. He sneaked a glance at Ed instead.

Ed’s gaze was still fixed on Al, but his eyes were suspiciously shiny, and his mouth was very, very tight.

Roy fished his handkerchief out of his breast pocket and held it out, looking straight ahead.

A moment passed.

Ed snatched it from him.

He lowered his hand.

  


* * *

  


Roy spent the next hour reflecting on how unfortunate it was that the letter _E_ was so early in the alphabet. When the ceremony finally concluded, the entire audience was released out into the open air of a courtyard, and Roy smiled sunnily at everyone who glanced at them twice.

Ordinarily, Ed would have been bouncing on the balls of his feet and trying to jump a little to see over people’s shoulders while they waited for the newly-minted graduates to filter out of the hall. The fact that he was, instead, standing very still with his arms folded tightly across his chest—perilously near to having wrapped them around himself—and watching the proceedings slightly hazily was cause for some alarm.

“Ed,” Roy said, keeping his voice too low to interrupt Havoc and Breda doing a dramatic reenactment of one of the pranks at their academy graduation for Elysia’s benefit, “maybe I should take you—”

“There he is,” Ed said. “ _There he—_ ”

Ed dodged past him and blasted across the open space, the better to slam into an already-laughing Alphonse Elric hard enough to send the mortarboard flying. They spun in three full circles, during the first of which Ed had picked Al up off of the ground, although Al lifted him for the other two.

Their motley crew migrated over just in time to witness Al putting his hands on Ed’s shoulders, pushing him back a bit, and saying “ _Brother_ , you said you were getting _better_!”

“I am,” Ed said, hoarsely. “I feel great. Look at you. You’re—”

“Officially overeducated,” Al said, shaking him extremely gently. “Brother, go _home_. Please.”

Ed glowered. “You’re only gonna—”

“Graduate once,” Al said. “Unless I go for a doctorate, or a medical degree, or one of about twenty possible certificates—Ed, _please_. You look miserable. What good is me graduating today if you’re in the hospital tomorrow?”

“It’s not _that_ bad,” Ed said.

Eight adults and one ten-year-old pointedly cleared their throats in perfect unison.

Al leaned forward and bumped his forehead against Ed’s, then touched his curled fist to Ed’s collarbone. “It’s okay, Brother. It really is. Winry’s gonna be along soon when her train gets in, and we’re all going to have a really nice weekend, and you need to go home and sleep so that you can enjoy it.”

“Don’t make me carry you,” Roy said.

Ed bared his teeth, which unfortunately— _terribly_ unfortunately, for both of them, in different ways—did not provoke the reaction in Roy that Ed had probably intended.

Al patted Ed’s shoulder. “I wouldn’t let him,” Al said. He waited until Ed had started to relax before he added, “It’s my right as your brother to have first dibs on flinging you over my shoulder when you’re being a mule.”

Ed punched Al in the arm—but with the left hand, and everyone present could tell that he’d pulled it.

“Fine,” he said. “Enjoy your horrible party, you _traitor_. Mustang, where the hell did you park?”

  


* * *

  


As they started down the sidewalk, the silence seemed comfortable enough to Roy, but apparently Ed had just been lying in wait.

“You know,” Ed said, “I think if you’d tried just a _little_ bit harder, you could’ve parked further away.”

“Forgive me,” Roy said. It was hardly his fault that the nearest three blocks had been crammed with cars bearing well-wishers. He wondered how astronomical the tuition at Amestris Central University was, if every single family who sent a student there could afford to have a vehicle or five. “If I’d known that you were going to be sick, I would have driven into the courtyard, mowed down some civilians, and left the car idling right next to the graduation hall.”

Ed tried to hide a grin, but he wasn’t quick enough. “I didn’t mean for me. Must be a long walk for somebody your age. What are you up to, now? Forty-six? Forty-eight?”

“Regardless of how sick you are,” Roy said warmly, “I _will_ set your hair on fire.”

Ed laughed. There was just a touch of a wheeze at the top register of it, which was unsettling, but Roy didn’t have time to comment. “I’m so glad I didn’t take a cab. You have to pay extra for the threats of bodily harm.”

“Depends on the cabbie,” Roy said. “Do you need to stop by the pharmacy on the way?”

“You have to pay extra for threats of bodily harm there, too,” Ed said.

“Depends on the pharmacist,” Roy said. They turned what he believed was the last corner.

“It’s all right,” Ed said, as if everyone he knew hadn’t heard him say that immediately after spitting blood at least once in the past decade. “Al panicked at the first sniffle and got us enough cold medicine to fell an elephant.”

“Hopefully that won’t be necessary,” Roy said. “I’m surprised that you could fit one into your apartment in the first place.”

Ed gave him a—look. Which he supposed that he deserved. There was an extremely clever joke here about the elephant in the not-actually-a-room, but he’d just fumbled it.

He pointed, which at least was better than nothing. “Nearly there.”

Ed squinted with puffy eyes and then cast a look in each direction as they approached the specimen that Roy had picked out of a long line of practically identical black cars. “How do you even know this is yours?”

Roy gestured with the hand that he hadn’t started fishing for his keys with. “That dent on the fender came from a very tense encounter with a fire hydrant. And there are somehow always newspapers on the backseat even though I never bring newspapers in with me. Sometimes there’s also my coat.”

Ed nodded, eyes glazed in a thoughtful way now, instead of just a symptomatic one. Roy opened the passenger door for him, and he muttered “Thanks” very quietly, as if a lower volume would make it less polite.

When Roy settled in and turned the key in the ignition, Ed said, “They should put an identifier on them. I read Aerugo does plates on the back. Somebody should work on that.”

“Somebody is,” Roy said, drawing them cautiously out onto the street. “Colonel Baummler is in charge of the legislation and the logistics.”

“Let me rephrase that,” Ed said. “Somebody who could find his way out of a paper bag with a flashlight and a set of directions should work on it.”

Roy bit back a grin. “You _do_ realize that that narrows it down quite a lot when it comes to our government. What street are you on?”

Ed made a scoffing noise significantly less aggressive than Roy would have expected. “Like you don’t know.”

“You might have moved since the last time I looked into it,” Roy said.

“We didn’t,” Ed said. “It’s the place on Laurel. Pretty close to Al’s classes; pretty close to… whatever the fuck I do.”

Roy couldn’t help it: “What do you do?”

He could feel Ed eyeing him, but he couldn’t afford to stop looking at the road when he was already so… what? Piqued? Probably that was the kindest word. It certainly wasn’t as if he’d never made a fool of himself in front of Ed before, but just now…

“Whatever I find, I guess,” Ed said, slowly, like he was waiting for the deluge of derision. “Got a part-time research contract with the school. Did some materials stuff in Rush Valley for a bit when Al was off for the summer, which was the _wrong_ damn choice, but getting heatstroke got me started on medical devices, so I guess that worked out. Been teaching a little. Al thought I was checking up on him, so he audited my class to ask me a bunch of obnoxious questions, thinking he could distract me and get revenge. Just ended up making the class better, though, so the joke’s on him, I guess.”

“Did you enjoy it?” Roy asked.

“What?” Ed asked. “Coming out on top when my brother was trying to play me? Or teaching?”

“I suspect I know the answer to the first one,” Roy said.

“Yeah,” Ed said, gazing out the window. “Teaching was fine. I liked it. Didn’t like it enough to know for sure if I want to do it all the time for the rest of my life, though.”

“Unless they make you sign a contract in blood,” Roy said, “in a dark room full of black candles with some eerie chanting in the background, I don’t imagine that you’d be bound to _any_ profession all the time for the rest of your life.” He considered as they reached another stoplight. “If an employer does ask for that, by the way, it’s likely a sign that you shouldn’t take the job.”

“Always wondered how they got you into the military,” Ed said. “Good to know.”

Roy glanced at him while they waited for the light to change. The conversation seemed to have perked him up a little, but he still looked remarkably pale and exhausted, all things considered.

The light turned green.

Roy put his foot on the gas again, and focused on accelerating slowly so that he wouldn’t jerk Ed’s tormented body around any more than strictly necessary.

“I’m just not really sure what I want to do,” Ed said. “Feels like I’m wasting time.”

“You’re _twenty-two_ ,” Roy said.

“Depending on who you ask,” Ed said, “technically I’m twelve.”

He had done that on purpose, specifically to short-circuit—pun _viciously_ intended—Roy’s aging heart. “You—”

“There’s this wellspring of rebirth up in the mountains in Xing,” Ed said, perfectly calmly, but the shit-eating grin gave him away. “I sort of… accidentally got pushed into it, so… yeah. But the priests decided that since I only spent about thirty seconds in the water, it should only give me back ten years instead of all of ’em.”

“I imagine,” Roy said, “that the falling was accidental, but the pushing was not.”

“Semantics,” Ed said. “If you’re asking if I deserved it, the answer is _yes_ ; and if you’re asking if it was Ling, the answer is a louder, funnier _yes_.”

“But of course,” Roy said. “Turning international relations on its head and shaking it for loose changes is always good for a chortle.”

“You’d already know that if you weren’t such a wet blanket,” Ed said, entirely too smugly for someone who was supposed to be under the weather.

A wet blanket sounded like what Ed needed right now—a very small, rather cool one for the forehead, but the point stood.

“Hey,” Ed said before Roy could think of an appropriately witty way to wrangle that into a sentence. “How’d you know you that wanted to do this military lackey thing for the whole rest of your life?”

“I didn’t,” Roy said. “I wasn’t looking very far ahead when I made the initial decision, and it was a cascade of consequences from there.” He paused. “Which isn’t to say… If I wanted to quit tomorrow—if I _really_ wanted to quit—I could. I could leave, and start over. It wouldn’t be easy, and it wouldn’t be fun, but that’s almost always on the table if it comes down to it.”

“I don’t think I like this table,” Ed muttered. “I think it’s one of the super overpriced ones at the furniture store that was made by some self-important designer who has some weirdo minimalist aesthetic and doesn’t even know what you _use_ a coffee table for.”

“Putting your feet up and storing books?” Roy said.

“Exactly,” Ed said. “And food, sometimes. Do you like it?”

Roy gazed in amazement at the road. They really were having this conversation, although he wasn’t entirely sure if Ed was going to remember much of it tomorrow. Ed still seemed lucid, but he also seemed to be vibrating gently at the edge of Roy’s vision, which was likely the start of a chill. “The military?”

“No,” Ed said. “Chauffeuring me around town because my immune system decided to take a vacation and let a pathogen punch me in the face.”

“I am liking that,” Roy said. “Somewhat in spite of myself. Possibly quite a lot in spite of myself.” He grimaced, which was better than the original impulse to sigh. “As far as… the job… well. There are things that I like about it. There are things that I like doing. I like _winning_ , but I really don’t like trying to determine if I’ve won, so I think that one is a wash. The people immediately around me are, of course, irreplaceable, and I think that that’s half the battle sometimes. Doing things that you don’t like with people that you do like makes a difference.” He shifted his hands on the steering wheel. He could feel Ed’s eyes boring into the side of his skull; fever or no, an Elric with a scientific inquiry was utterly relentless. At least some things hadn’t changed. “But that’s me. I’m not doing it because I like it; I’m doing it because it feels like it matters, and that’s always been more important to me. That’s a personal priority. I think that _you_ should do something—or at least start out with something—that you really, genuinely enjoy, minute by minute and day by day.”

Ed was quiet. They were coming up on the apartment complex; it was a left turn onto Laurel Lane and then another half a block.

As they turned the corner, Ed said, “Why?”

Roy was just startled and just distracted enough to forget to twist the truth.

“Because you deserve to be happy,” he said.

It occurred to him, as they pulled up in front of the building with, its winsome little cement block of a marker and its comforting wall of small, identical windows, that he’d also implied the opposite—that he, himself, _did not_.

That was true, obviously, but it wasn’t the sort of thing that one ordinarily mentioned in casual conversation.

“Huh,” Ed said.

Roy looked at him.

Ed looked at the car door.

He’d gone a flushed pink instead of pale, and he was definitely shivering a bit.

“Ed,” Roy said.

“I’m fine,” Ed said.

He pulled the door handle and shoved the door. It swung about a foot out from the car, wavered, and swung back.

“Okay,” Ed said, and it was the puzzled tone that concerned Roy more than anything else, “maybe… not. Or at least not as fine as I wanted. I _feel_ fine. Fine-ish. I’m not dying. Trust me; I’d know.”

Roy did trust him. And Roy knew, too—knew the cold creep of it up coiling up every nerve like a fast-moving frost; knew the echo of the revelation dawning; knew the horror of the fascination watching the blood pour and calculating how much more you could afford to lose before your brain shut off; knew the way your soul clamped down and whispered _No_.

“The difference,” Roy said, “between ‘dying’ and ‘fine’ is fairly substantial by most people’s standards.”

Ed grinned at him—red and shaky and resplendent. Roy was so, so fucked.

“You have never,” Ed said, “in your entire life, mistaken me for _most people_.”

Roy sighed. Feelingly.

  


* * *

  


They managed to make it up to Ed’s and Al’s apartment—Roy pretended not to know the number; it seemed polite—with Ed mostly just leaning on Roy’s arm instead of requiring it to be wrapped around him for support. That was a shame, since Roy imagined that it would have felt lovely; and a relief, since he imagined that he would have had a difficult damn time letting go.

Roy had spent a fanciful moment or two over the years wondering what an Elric domicile would look like, once they’d actually had some time to settle in. The vast collection of framed artwork from Xing was an initial surprise, but upon a second thought, it did make sense—they’d spent a fair bit of time there, and family was very important to them. Of course they would cherish reminders of that connection.

The books were not a surprise. The extremely thick rug underneath the battered brown leather couch was a slightly incongruous pale blue color, but given that Al’s style and Ed’s would have necessarily collided in this space, Roy supposed that was lucky he hadn’t been re-blinded by the results.

There was evidence of a hurried morning; three rejected ties draped forlornly over the back of one of the kitchen chairs, and two coffee mugs and a plate speckled with crumbs still sat on the table; but overall it certainly wasn’t the slovenly genius den that Roy had secretly feared. It was comfortable, and lived-in, and… nice.

Ed unlatched his left hand from where he’d grasped Roy’s arm and used the couch to hold himself upright instead. “Cool. Thanks. See you around.”

If Ed had believed for a solitary instant that Roy would leave that easily, he was _much_ sicker than Roy had thought.

“Like hell, Ed,” he said. Perhaps he’d make more progress if he spoke the right language. He caught up Ed’s metal elbow this time and towed gently. The floorplan made it fairly self-evident that the bedrooms were down the short hall adjacent to the living room. “Are all of the elephant-felling medicines in the bathroom?”

“I’m _fine_ ,” Ed said. He shivered in Roy’s grip, hard enough this time that the metal fingers clinked.

Even if he hadn’t angled his body slightly towards the first bedroom, Roy would have suspected that it was his simply from the fact that this door was shut tightly, and the one set opposite was not. The metaphor spoke for itself.

“Just need a nap,” Ed was saying. “Give me half an hour, and I’ll be back in action.”

“No,” Roy said. He opened the door. The curtains of the room were drawn; the laundry basket overflowed with clothes, and the desk overflowed with notes, but it was anything but neglected. There was a corkboard laden with dozens of photographs on the wall beside the desk. Roy pushed Ed—as gently as possible—down on the unmade bed. The fact that Ed sat obediently was probably a bad sign. “Pretend for a moment,” Roy said, “that you don’t care whether I know how sick you are, for whatever reason it is that the idea is so scandalous to you. How do you feel?”

Ed smiled wanly. “Like shit. I’ve got _good_ reasons, by the way.” He lifted his right hand and laid the back of it against his forehead. “That… wow.” He closed his eyes. “That’s amazing. Can you prop my arm up just like this? This is nice.”

Roy despaired in silence for a few seconds before reaching out, grasping Ed’s wrist, drawing the automail away, and pressing his hand to Ed’s forehead instead.

It felt… sweaty. And very, _very_ warm, but Roy wasn’t sure exactly what caliber of very-warm constituted an emergency. His only two categorizations for his own illnesses were the kind where Riza walked in, took one look at him, and told him to put his big boy uniform on; and the kind were Riza walked in, took one look at him, stopped in her tracks, and ordered him to go home immediately. He wasn’t entirely sure what the distinction was, and he certainly couldn’t quantify the temperature difference in a tactile way.

“If it’s over a hundred and three,” Roy said, because he did know that much, “you’re going to a doctor.”

“It’s not over a hundred and three,” Ed said. He was looking up at Roy, and his eyelashes were brushing the heel of Roy’s hand.

Roy tried to make withdrawing his hand look like the natural course of action, rather than like a tactical retreat. “How do you know?”

“I’m not hallucinating yet,” Ed said. “And I can _stand_.”

“Barely,” Roy said. He stepped out into the hall, where it was significantly safer. “I refuse to believe that two scientists don’t own a thermometer. This will go much faster if you tell me where it is.”

“Bring me the meds first,” Ed said. “I wanna chase aspirin with cough syrup and find out what happens.”

“Eventually,” Roy said, “your liver fails.” The bathroom seemed like as good a place to begin the search as any. Al wouldn’t let them go without medical measuring devices; he wasn’t the type. “Unless the aspirin makes your kidneys go first. People who were impaled in recent memory don’t get cough syrup _and_ aspirin. You have to pick one.”

Edward Elric had not once, in their acquaintance, been deterred from a conversation by the presence of a wall. “I can’t believe you’re so committed to being a spoilsport that you followed me home.”

“I drove you here,” Roy said.

“Semantics again,” Ed said. “You’re in the wrong field.”

Roy opened the medicine cabinet. There was, in fact, enough cold medicine to sedate a moose, but he was doubtful about the elephant.

On the shelf below, there was a nice glass thermometer. It was like Alphonse had known that he was coming.

Given Al’s borderline-psychic predictive tendencies, it was distinctly possible that he had.

As a matter of habit, since Roy couldn’t begin to wonder how many dubious scientific uses it had been repurposed for, he cleaned the tip of the thermometer thoroughly and then checked the glass for marks or nicks or cracks as he brought it back to the bedroom. “At least this will keep you quiet about my life choices for a grand total of three minutes.”

Ed’s eyes sharpened, but he said it so casually that Roy almost didn’t— “There’s other places you could put that that’d probably be more fun.”

Roy blinked at him.

Roy’s brain fritzed.

Roy’s mouth said, “At _least_ buy me a drink first, Ed.”

Ed buried his face in his knees and succumbed to a fit of… giggles. Likely that could be blamed on the assault on his immune system depriving him of the energy for anything harsher or lower or deeper from the chest, but it was utterly staggering all the same.

Roy started to reach towards him and hesitated. Ed raised his head enough for his eyes to gleam.

“Sorry,” Roy said, without being entirely sure what he was apologizing for. On the upside, not having the slightest clue what was going on in a conversation that he was participating in felt somewhat stabilizing when it came to Ed. “Are you—delirious?”

“ _No_ ,” Ed said, which was of course precisely what a person who was delirious would say. “Just—really didn’t expect you to go for the rectal thermometer joke.”

“Well,” Roy said, “you’re the one who’s been telling me that I have a stick up my ass for ten years. Is it really such a leap?”

Ed buried his face in his knees and laughed again, and Roy was—possessed. Roy was owned and operated by a vengeful demon that wanted nothing but to elicit that soft, sweet, helpless little laugh from Ed every day from now until approximately forever.

It did sort of figure that Roy’s demonic possessor would be the single tritest evil spirit that the world had ever seen. Riza was going to have a field day.

“It’s not necessary anyway,” the demon using Roy’s voice said calmly. “I already know that your ass is hot. Everyone in Central knows that. It’s the temperature of the rest of you that I’m worried about.”

Ed was looking at him. It was an assessing look, and a perilously meaningful one.

Roy held out the thermometer.

Ed took it, raised it, fixed his eyes on Roy’s, and dragged his tongue extremely slowly up the length of the glass.

At least it would be terrifically ironic if Roy was the one who passed out while Ed was battling the fever from hell.

“Put it in your mouth, Ed,” he fought out, “or I’ll do it for you.”

At least the smirk was somewhat more familiar, even if it was just as dangerous in a different way. “Take me to dinner first.”

“Ed,” Roy said, deliberately choosing one word at a time from the dervish of possibilities that had whipped itself up to a gale force inside his head, “if you’re sick enough to need medical attention, and your brother discovers that we were too busy…” Flirting. That was what this was. He was _flirting_ with _Ed_.

And it was _working_.

“…making plans,” he managed, “to take care of you properly, I think we might be looking at a double homicide.”

Ed pulled another truly remarkable face, but Roy knew a winning hand when he played it. Reluctantly, but without much further ado, Ed put the thermometer under his tongue and clamped his mouth shut. Roy drew out his pocketwatch and stared at the second-hand, knowing full well that—

“Muth’ang,” Ed said.

Roy eyed him. “Shh.”

Ed scowled back; the thermometer bobbed. “Y—”

“ _Shh_ ,” Roy said.

Ed mumbled something that must have been _Bossy_ underneath the thermometer’s interference.

“You knew that when you let me drive you home,” Roy said. “Now _hush_.”

He decided to add an extra fifteen seconds onto the three minutes that they ordinarily would have been required to wait, in the hopes that it would even out all of the talking. It was really, really a shame—in an uncountable quantity of ways—that Ed was so damn cute when he was pouting like this around the rod of glass stuck in his mouth.

It was really a shame that Ed was so damn cute all the time, but that was something of a foregone conclusion.

Roy glanced up from the face of the watch. Ed was glowering at him. The thermometer looked like a lollipop. Roy could not afford to think in detail about Ed’s tongue any more than he already had today.

He looked back down at the watch, more intently this time.

“Ninety more seconds,” he said.

Ed mumbled something that sounded suspiciously like _Bullshit_ this time, but at least he kept the tube more or less securely in his perfect mouth.

Roy waited, resisting the urge to hold his breath, until the last five seconds had elapsed, and then he chanced looking up again. “All right.”

Ed made yet another face—how did he have so many of them, with so many nuances of discontentment?—and withdrew the thermometer. He extended it to Roy.

“Here,” Ed said. “My finest spit.”

“Only the best will do,” Roy said, taking it gingerly—more in an attempt to avoid brushing his fingertips all over Ed’s than because of the saliva involved. Ed’s saliva was not nearly as off-putting as…

Never mind.

The line of quicksilver had settled firmly between the gradation mark for one hundred and one hundred and one.

“It is officially not a medical emergency,” Roy said.

“Huzzah,” Ed said, scrubbing at his eyes with the knuckles of his left hand. “Can I mix meds in peace now?”

“That,” Roy said, “would be a great way to make it _become_ a medical emergency.” He stepped back out into the hall, and thence into the little bathroom—which was, now that he had slightly less urgent a reason to be examining it, neater than he’d expected; was that Al’s insistence, or Ed’s maturity?—so that he could clean the thermometer for the inevitable next round. He brought it and a small selection of the medicine cabinet’s excess back to the bedroom again.

“I don’t think you understand how high my tolerance for painkillers is,” Ed said.

He was probably right. Roy imagined that the nerves that automail didn’t directly damage likely resented the intrusion more than a bit; the weight of it alone might bring less-pigheaded bearers of it to their knees. It probably hurt more, and more often, than he could conceptualize.

But Ed was still shaking slightly, cheeks and throat and forehead flushed, with sweat standing out on all three.

Roy set the thermometer down and held the aspirin up in one hand and the cold medicine in the other. “Which of these will better help you sleep?”

Ed groaned. He’d drawn his knees up to his chest, pulling the blankets of the bed over them, which Roy was going to deal with as soon as he felt brave enough. Ed laid his head on his knees again and closed his eyes. Bits of his bangs stuck to his forehead.

“Gimme the aspirin,” he said. “You _tyrant_. Ought to have a more direct effect on the fever, and then maybe this’ll be over faster, and I can go back to makin’ bad choices without you trying to meddle in every single one.”

“For what it’s worth,” Roy said, setting the cold medicine down in a small empty space on Ed’s desk, “it’s my finest meddling.”

“Good,” Ed said. “We don’t settle for mediocre meddling in this house.”

He held his left hand out for the bottle of aspirin. Since Roy hadn’t been born yesterday, and hadn’t met Ed this morning, however, he stepped back and squinted at the label instead of handing it over. The print was too small; he stifled a sigh and drew his glasses out of his shirt pocket, and then he slung them on and tried again.

A more successful perusal indicated that the recommended standard dose was two tablets, which he poured out into his own palm and offered out to Ed. He pocketed the bottle.

“Tomorrow,” Ed said, staring at Roy’s open hand, “I am going to feel better, and I am going to kick your _ass_.”

“I look forward to it,” Roy said.

Ed glared at him, plucked the pills out of his hand, and dry-swallowed them with so little difficulty that Roy had to best the urge to wince.

But it also reminded him to step out and brave the kitchen in search of a serviceable drinking vessel and some water. He could take his glasses off for that.

“Where the fuck are you goin’ now?” Ed called. “I can try to kick your ass today if you really want, but I don’t know how well it’s gonna go for either of us.”

“Rain check,” Roy said. One of the cabinets yielded up glassware. Praise be. “Is kicking a step up or a step down from thermometers?”

“Depends what you’re into,” Ed said. There was a pause, and then he said, in an entirely different tone of voice, “What _are_ you into?”

Roy almost dropped the glass into the sink. “I—rain check on that, too.”

“You’re no fun,” Ed said.

Roy managed to fill the glass without any further close calls, and even succeeded in bringing it back to Ed’s bedroom. “Wouldn’t be the first time I’d heard that.”

Ed was eyeing him again as he entered. “Well—I—didn’t—really mean it. Much.” Roy offered out the glass, and he took it carefully in both hands and muttered, “Thanks.”

“At your service,” Roy said, pulling Ed’s desk chair slightly closer to the bed and settling in it.

“ _Barely_ ,” Ed said. He gulped down a significant quantity of the water and then held the automail against his forehead again. “Damn. The persistent ones are such a pain in the ass.” He glanced at Roy again, silver and gold with blood in his cheeks, chewing on his bottom lip, and…

And.

“Hey,” he said. “I shouldn’t’ve… I’m sorry I made you sit next to me. I don’t think I’m contagious anymore, but this seems worse than I figured on. I hope I didn’t get you sick. I just—” The eyes flicked away, and then to Roy’s face, and then away again. “Just kinda… wanted to talk to you.”

“If there’s anything that Central City hasn’t hit me with yet,” Roy said, “I’d rather catch it from you than just about anybody else.”

Ed blinked at him.

Roy blinked back.

“I’m gonna say something,” Ed said. “Something _really_ funny. It’s gonna involve a ‘hit that’ joke about you and then a joke about catching stuff. I’m getting there. Give me a minute.”

Roy’s brain either wanted him dead or wanted him to get laid, and the fact that he couldn’t tell which was tremendously unnerving. “Don’t worry. No risk of the second in the event of the first.”

Ed stared for a second.

And then he _smirked_.

“Why, General _Mustang_ ,” he said, and even bed-bound and sick as a dog, he was devastating, and Roy was in so, so, _so_ far over his head— “If I didn’t know better, I’d think—”

“Rain check,” Roy said, slightly desperately this time. “You need some sleep, Ed.”

Ed rubbed at his eyes with his left hand again. “I hate it so much when you’re right.”

At least that felt familiar.

“Thank you,” Roy said. “Possibly.”

Ed’s half-smile wasn’t quite obscured by his hand. “Possibly.” The smile twisted into a grimace as another round of shivering racked his shoulders. “ _Jeez_ , will you go hit the heater? What the hell is wrong with this day?”

“Ed,” Roy said, which seemed marginally kinder than _I think you and I both know why I’m not going to do that_.

Sure enough, Ed slanted a swift glare at him and then immediately started gathering up the blankets on the bed, pulling them closer to him. “What kind of a nurse are you? Where’d you get certified? I’m gonna write a strongly-worded letter. I’ll make Al help. He’s really good at those.”

Roy had rarely heard anything less surprising, but unfortunately it was a long way beside the point.

He tried again, with a touch of gentleness, and a dose of iron. “Ed.”

Ed paused in attempting to mummify himself for long enough to give Roy a plaintive look. “Come _on_ , Mustang. It’s not that bad—you just saw. It’s just gonna go away on its own. I’ll be fine.”

“Wait,” Roy said. “The automail. That significantly reduces the volume of blood that you have—does it affect your standard body temperature? If your normal isn’t the regular—”

“ _No_ ,” Ed said. “It’s _fine_. Call Winry if you want to. Well, you can’t, but—ask her later. I’m telling you the damn truth.” He gritted his teeth, although that might just have been to stop them from chattering. “I’m just cold.”

“And sick,” Roy said.

“Of _you_ ,” Ed said.

Roy gave him a look that Riza would have been proud of.

Ed whined piteously in the back of his throat, which sounded so much like something else entirely that it would have taken Roy out at the knees if he’d still been standing. Riza would have been much less proud of that.

Roy hoped that this was rock bottom, and that therefore the only direction left was up. He also hoped that the third time might be the charm.

“Ed,” he said. He leaned forward far enough to curl his hands into the blankets. Ed watched him with the wariness of a cornered animal, but Roy had played this game before. “It’s just for a little while. Just while you get some sleep. I’ll give them back.”

An Elric glower was worth well over a thousand words, but Roy had not made it this far by being a lousy negotiator.

“It’s temporary,” he said, coaxingly now, as he tugged very gently at the blankets that Ed was trying to hoard. “How about this? You sleep under circumstances designed to lower your temperature for one hour—I’ll time it, and I’ll wake you up—and then we’ll test it and see if it helped. If it didn’t, you can have all of these back again.”

He had miscalculated one critical component of this plan: how close their faces would have to be in order for him to pry the bedclothes out of Ed’s hands. Calling it kissing distance would have been generous.

Ed’s eyes narrowed. His jaw worked. He swallowed, and the tip of his tongue grazed across his lower lip, and his gaze flicked over Roy’s face from top to bottom and then back up.

The slow grin that unfurled across his face was somehow even worse from here.

“Jeez,” he said, hardly any louder than a whisper. “You’re willing to try every single strategy in the book except askin’ nice, aren’t you?”

Roy stayed very still. If he moved, he might do something that Ed would later regret, whatever had been said before. What had been said was conversation and fun and possibly delirium. None of it counted. None of it was binding. It was entirely possible that none of it was even true. “Would that have worked?”

“Of course not,” Ed said. “But you could’ve tried it.”

Roy blinked.

“Just take ’em already,” Ed said, releasing the blankets and moving both hands up to the collar of his shirt, “before I remember that being comfortable’s better than being smart. I know how fevers work.”

Roy attempted to rummage for some last scrap of wit to deploy as a response. His fingernails scraped the very bottom of the barrel, and he came up empty-handed.

At least he didn’t need much in the way of intellect to gather the blankets at the foot of the bed, where they wouldn’t even raise the temperature of Ed’s single set of toes.

“Hey,” Ed said. He was tussling with the top button of his shirt, which correlated directly to Roy’s continued inability to produce recognizable words. “Little help? These damn things are slippery enough with automail when my hands aren’t shaking, y’know, so—”

Roy didn’t know.

But he wanted to.

He wanted to know everything that he could do; everything that he could offer; everything that he could give. Everything that would make Ed’s life better, or easier, or kinder, or sweeter, or—

He was reaching forward and unbuttoning Ed’s shirt.

_He was_ —

“Oh,” Ed said. The tone of it encapsulated a particular combination of startlement and awe and giddy desire that matched Roy’s feelings frighteningly perfectly. “Uh. If… if this part is supposed to lower my body temperature, too, we’re… not off to the greatest start.”

Roy paused. He’d undone a grand total of three buttons, despite a valiant attempt to undertake the task so swiftly and efficiently that it might come off as clinical. This was a medical concern, not a… not… Not a reason for his entire body to be warming with a craving for more, for _everything_ —

“I’m sorry,” he said.

Ed snorted. “I’m not. Just—”

Roy undid three more as quickly as humanly possible, drawing the placket away from Ed’s chest to minimize the amount of dancing that his fingertips did along the heated contours of Ed’s beautiful skin. He sat back in the chair and considered scooting it halfway across the room so that he couldn’t reach for more if he wanted to.

He did—want to, that was. With a fervor that roared in his ears like a hurricane all around him; with a sincerity that terrified him.

Not _now_ , precisely, given the circumstances at hand, but—

“Okay,” Ed said. He shrugged the shirt off. Roy’s mouth went dry; his throat went dry; his head went empty. “Happy now?”

“Elated,” Roy said.

“I can tell,” Ed said.

Roy attempted not to move, and also not to breathe, since that might help to cut down on the impulses for movement. He could have trailed his fingertips along Ed’s collarbones; could have run them down the plane of Ed’s sternum and fanned his fingers out along Ed’s ribs; could have chased the pressure of his hands with his mouth, with his tongue, with his teeth—

He could have kissed along the gleaming edge of the automail where it met the skin in a riot of red scars; could have followed the curve of it up along the side of Ed’s neck to reach his ear and whisper _There is not a single thing about you that is unappealing, and I should be so afraid_.

Ed shifted in the bed until he could lie down and wriggle his way under the sheet that he’d been permitted to keep. He drew it up over his chest, which was both a mercy and a shame, and then took up eyeing Roy again.

“Are you okay?” he said.

“Fine,” Roy said, folding his hands together tightly to restrain them. “Ish.”

One of Ed’s eyebrows arched.

“Rain check,” Roy said.

Something must have made it through—slipped through the gaps in his self-control; filtered past the fine mesh of the veil. Ed had always had a way of seeing to the heart of things.

The other eyebrow rose, and Ed smiled thinly. He settled on his back, left hand curled on top of the sheets over the center of his chest.

“Okay,” Ed said. “Your work here is done, Mustang. They’ll probably be back soon anyway. You can leave.”

Ed had also always had a way of knocking him on his ass when he least expected it. “Why in the world would I do that?”

Ed shrugged, which looked odd when he was lying down. “You’ve got stuff to do. I bet you didn’t plan on sitting there and watching me sleep all day.”

Roy opened his mouth to say something about the best-laid stratagems, determined at the last second that he didn’t want to encourage his brain _any_ further in the direction of the word “laid”, and hauled on the lever to divert the train. “I don’t mind.”

Miraculously, that was actually worse.

Ed had that effect on him. The illness behind the fever might not be contagious, but the intensity of the honesty always was.

He could tell in the first instant, though, that Ed didn’t buy it. He wasn’t sure whether to find that flattering—Ed didn’t believe that he was so generous a soul as to enjoy staying, but _did_ believe that he was willing to do it anyway. Staying because it was important, rather than enjoyable, was a different sort of kindness.

“I’m serious,” Ed said, shuffling himself around a little to settle his head better on the pillow. “Al’ll probably call as soon as I fall asleep, knowing my luck. I promise I won’t even go on a reckless cold medicine binge the minute you walk out the door.”

“I’m serious, too,” Roy said. “It’s really all right.”

Ed eyed him for a few seconds and then huffed a breath that sounded a little like a sigh. “Whatever, Mustang. I mean it. Something comes up, or you get bored, or whatever, you can leave. I’m not gonna hold that against you. S’your damn weekend, too.” He slung his arm over his face just in time to shield a cavernous yawn with the inside of his elbow. “Fuck. All right. G’night, Mustang. Good afternoon. Whatever.”

Roy said “Sleep well,” and the ease of it prickled swiftly down his spine and then crawled all the way back up.

Ed mumbled something, and then went quiet, and then went still.

Roy waited, arms folded expectantly, until Ed’s breathing had slowed down and evened out enough that it was clear he wasn’t faking. Then Roy got up, as quietly as possible, and crept out into the living room to cast around for the most interesting-looking tome of alchemical arcana readily available.

He was, of course, spoiled for choice. He selected a promising looking volume of monstrous size, settled back down in Ed’s desk chair, and put his glasses on. If nothing else, he could look over them at Ed disapprovingly if Ed tried to flee the bed.

The book would, under other circumstances, have been quite fascinating. But the circumstances at hand involved Edward Elric lying in bed, shirtless, within arm’s reach, with his incomparable hair a matted mess and a shine of sweat on his forehead. Roy ghosted into the bathroom again to soak a washcloth with cool water, brought it back, waited with it dripping into both of his hands until he was _positive_ that Ed was sleeping soundly, and very gently wiped the sweat away. He had no doubt that Ed would produce plenty more where that had come from, but surely removing it at intervals would help.

He kept his movements as light and slow and soothing as he could, although the fact that Ed didn’t even stir besides shivering was probably more of a reflection on the fever than an indication of success. He went and wrung the towel out in the bathroom sink, re-dampened it, folded it as neatly as he could, and returned to lay it on Ed’s forehead. He was fairly sure that that was the sort of thing that you were supposed to do, and it made sense, from a scientific perspective. It would help cool the blood moving through the vessels around Ed’s brain—which were, of course, among the hardest-working ones he had—and offer him an artificial perspiration effect as the water seeping out from it evaporated.

Roy altered his assessment: the book was boring. It did not, even once, distract him from Ed for more than five minutes at a stretch. He’d lost entire nights to a good alchemy book in his youth; he’d forgotten an entire day’s worth of meals; and this tragic excuse for a treatise couldn’t even hold his eyes for more than a couple of paragraphs before they lifted to Ed instead.

Did Ed look a touch better than before, or was that wishful thinking? Roy changed the towel out every fifteen minutes. In the intervening intervals, he sat in Ed’s desk chair and tried to stare down at the book or out the little window. Watching Ed while he slept would be creepy, even if he could pretend that it was a matter of monitoring his condition. _Roy_ knew that it wasn’t, and _Roy_ knew that it was because Ed was arresting and addictive even in small quantities and even while terrifically ill; ergo _Roy_ knew that it was creepy no matter how he tried to defend it.

Once he’d refreshed the towel a few more times, he made a valiant effort to care about the book. It seemed like the decent thing to do.

After what felt like about an hour and a half, all told, Ed shuddered, sighed, rolled onto the side facing Roy, and cracked an eye open. It still looked very lost there, framed by sweat-darkened hair and the staunchly lingering remnants of the flush, but it seemed clearer than before.

“Roy,” Ed said. His voice had strained a little, but held, which was perhaps more than could be said for Roy’s heart. Ed never— “Why are you still here?”

Roy set the book aside and took up the towel again. “Well, you see,” he said, “all of the other bedside vigils that I had scheduled for today canceled on me at the last minute.”

Ed wrinkled his nose, thought that over, and muttered “Funny” in a tone that made it impossible to distinguish if it was amused, annoyed, appreciative, or a threat.

Roy supposed that the answer to that didn’t change much: he leaned forward again and gently wiped Ed’s forehead clean of all of the recent exertions of its owner’s beleaguered immune system. The towel was getting to be a bit lukewarm; he’d have to go soak it again.

“It’s nice,” Ed said.

“Let me get it a bit cooler for you,” Roy said, standing up.

“No,” Ed said. His left hand emerged from under the sheet, but appeared to be too heavy to raise enough for full-fledged gestures: he made a looping motion with his index finger. “Not—I mean—yeah, but— _you_. What you’re doing. It’s nice. S’nice of you.”

Roy paused. “You’re sick. It’s hardly—”

“Shut up a sec,” Ed said. The index finger rubbed back and forth on the sheet a bit. “So… when… I get past this thing.” His eyes flicked up to Roy and then back down to the sheet. “Can I buy you a drink for real? Like—to thank you. Mostly.”

Roy stood very, very still with the towel in his hands and tried very, very hard not to hope.

Ed was ill and exhausted, teetering on the border of sleep and delirium. That was not what it sounded like. That was a young man who had been raised well and grown up far too fast, who had lost enough people in his life to understand the significance of someone staying with you in a crisis and being there when you woke up.

“You don’t need to thank me,” Roy said. “Pleasure’s all mine.”

“You’ve been cleanin’ up my sweat for two hours, Mustang,” Ed said. “Don’t bullshit me about whose pleasure it is.”

“Genius sweat sells for a pretty penny on the black market,” Roy said.

Ed wrinkled his nose again, harder this time, and Roy realized belatedly that that expression meant that he was trying not to laugh.

“Okay,” Ed said. “First off, that’s disgusting. Second, I’m not a genius. Or at least not in any way that matters. Or is relevant. Third, I can’t believe I forgot how fucking dense you can be when you want to.”

Roy clutched the towel a bit tighter, which was inadvisable, given that he’d just wrung some lukewarm sweat-water onto his own hands, and dripped a bit more of it onto the floor. “I beg your—”

“Do you wanna go out with me?” Ed said. “Or not? Obviously not—like—not _tonight_ , but—later. Sometime. Soon.”

Roy swallowed. He breathed. He forced a smile.

“Ed,” he said. “I helped because I wanted to. You don’t have to feel obligated to—”

Ed sat up—far too fast, far too abruptly; and Roy had taken a half-step towards him before he realized he’d moved.

“I’m not askin’ ’cause I feel fuckin’ _obligated_ ,” Ed said, and then he hissed through his teeth and clutched at his right shoulder without retreating an inch. “I’m _askin’_ ’cause you’re so fuckin’ hot you make this fever look pathetic, and I’ve been into you for years, and I put two thousand miles of sand in between us and still thought about your stupid face every single fuckin’ day, and you sat through Al’s stupid _graduation_ ’cause you knew it’d make both of us happy, and now you’re _here_. So fuckin’ _excuse_ fuckin’ _me_ if I—”

“Yes,” Roy said.

Ed stared at him.

He stared back.

It felt quite a bit like the entire planet had tipped over onto its side.

Ed cleared his throat, striving—unsuccessfully—to tamp down on the grin playing fervently around his mouth.

“Jeez,” he said, lying down again. “You could’ve just said something instead of letting me go off.”

“Letting you go off is one of life’s purest joys,” Roy said.

Ed rolled his eyes, which at least felt like a feature of a regularly-oriented planet. “Hey, y’know, if you’re worried about cold feet, we could always just drink cough syrup together. It’s got enough alcohol in it that it really ought to count as a cocktail anyway.”

“I’m not,” Roy said. “Worried, I mean.” Damn. Too honest again. Time for a swift, graceful change of subject. “But if you can wait until next Saturday, I can promise you much better drinks for a much better price.”

Ed looked at the bottle on the desk, pensively, and then at Roy, more pensively still. “I already paid for that. It’s free.”

Roy hesitated. “That’s… not how currency works.”

“Shut up,” Ed said. He wedged his left arm underneath himself and started trying to sit up, significantly more cautiously this time. “I’m sick; I get to make the rules.”

“That’s not how rules work,” Roy said, but he was setting the towel aside and reaching forward anyway.

“Is now,” Ed said.

Roy flattened a hand on Ed’s bare back to help ease him up. “That’s not—”

“Saturday?” Ed said, beaming at him.

“If you’re feeling better,” Roy said. He had his palm pressed to Ed’s spine; he could feel Ed’s heartbeat. He could—just barely—feel it speeding up.

“Well, shit,” Ed said. “If they haven’t listed ‘impending date with Mustang’ as an official panacea, they oughta start.”

Roy gave him a look, which was even more enjoyable up close. Could he get away with wearing his glasses on Saturday? Knowing that there were details that he was missing—eyelashes, freckles, wispy hairs half-curled along Ed’s hairline and above his ears—rankled more than a bit.

“Did you have to use the word ‘impending’?” he asked. “You might have noticed that it’s more often followed by the word ‘doom’ than the word ‘date’.”

“Good,” Ed said, far too smugly. “Starts you out with something to prove.”

“Well,” Roy said, grazing his fingertips up Ed’s back and earning himself a very different sort of shiver, “I _can_ promise past a shadow of a doubt that the drinks will taste much better than cold medicine.”

“And you’ll be there,” Ed said, calmly.

Roy opened his mouth to say something pithy and clever and cute.

What came out was, “I also taste much better than cold medicine.”

Ed pressed his lips together hard enough to contain the laugh, but only just. “That sounds exactly like something that someone who tastes like cold medicine would say.”

Roy swallowed, and braced himself, and attempted to suppress the explosion of sheer disbelieving delight, and trailed his fingertips up high enough to toy with the end of Ed’s ponytail. “I can… prove it, if you like.”

Ed’s expression went somewhat pained. “I’m sick.”

“I don’t care,” Roy said.

Ed wrinkled his nose. “ _I_ care. If you get this, you’ll be sick next Saturday instead of buying me good drinks.”

Roy could not stop looking at his eyes. And his mouth. But the eyes were the problem. Mouths were a lot easier to excuse as a side effect of physical attraction. Eyes, though…

Well.

“You don’t know that for sure,” Roy said.

“My luck?” Ed said, scowling at him. “’Course I do.”

Roy knew when he’d been outmaneuvered—or, at least, when the battle wasn’t worth winning, because surrender would be so much sweeter in the end.

“All right,” he said.

He curled a finger under Ed’s chin, tilting his head back just slightly, leaned in, and looked right into Ed’s eyes.

“Rain check,” he said.

“Fuck _you_ , Mustang,” Ed said, but the laugh had already gotten the better of him.

**Author's Note:**

> Al's side of the Ed-teaching story, which Ed will never hear, is that he could tell that Ed _wanted_ to try teaching but felt like he wasn't qualified, so Al told him not to in order to make sure that he did. And then Al came to harangue him in all of his classes so that he'd get caught up in arguing about alchemy and forget to be nervous. c:


End file.
